Gives back to local communities

Communities

Pivotal Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.

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Why shareholder democracy is pivotal

This issue rates at the top of the scale because everything it measures is money a company decides to pay out and a policy a company decides to adopt, which is to say a set of budget lines a board sets and its owners can vote on. The published issue asks whether a company strengthens local communities through investment, volunteerism and charitable giving, and it scores that on three of the company's own choices: whether it discloses how much it gives to charity, whether it pays employees for time spent volunteering, and how many dollars it spends with diverse suppliers. Every company rated is drawn from the Russell 1000, the thousand largest publicly traded U.S. companies, 940 of them in the 2025 rankings, so no part of the measured outcome rests with an actor a shareholder vote cannot reach. Companies plainly choose differently. Across 219 large companies surveyed by CECP for 2023, total community investment ran from $459,000 to $4.5 billion, the top quartile gave 2.20% of pre-tax profit where the median gave 0.92%, and 53% cut their community investment between 2021 and 2023 while 42% raised it. Walmart decided one way in November 2024, declining to renew a five-year commitment to create a racial equity center and ending its supplier diversity goals. Costco's board decided the other way two months later, telling shareholders that diversity in its supplier base is good for the company and recommending a vote against a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research that attacked the program by name, which shareholders rejected by 281,267,612 shares to 4,857,195. Corporate political activity narrows the routes here rather than closing the outcome. The American Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose boards seat executives of JPMorganChase, Fulton Financial, Webster Financial, Old National Bancorp, Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Comcast, FedEx and Caterpillar among others, sued in February 2024 over the 2023 Community Reinvestment Act rule governing bank lending and investment in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, and the banking regulators' own account is that the rule never took effect as a result. There is a real disagreement about how much that fight bears on this issue, and the call made here is that it touches the investment the issue names but none of the three things it scores, and that the older 1995 framework stayed in force, so what the lawsuit stopped was an expansion rather than the duty. Closer to the shareholder lever, Business Roundtable, the Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, the National Association of Manufacturers, Exxon Mobil, FedEx and Nasdaq backed the 2020 SEC rule that raised the support a proposal needs to come back to the ballot from 3, 6 and 10 percent to 5, 15 and 25 percent; the one proposal in this record aimed at what the issue measures, a 2019 request that JPMorgan Chase disclose charitable recipients receiving $1,000 or more, beat the company's attempt to keep it off the ballot and then drew 2.54% of the vote. The largest documented threat to corporate giving is not corporate lobbying at all but the 1% floor on the corporate charitable deduction enacted in July 2025, which the Council on Foundations and more than 2,300 nonprofits asked the Senate to strike and which is projected to cut corporate giving by about $4.5 billion a year. Giving, paid volunteer time and supplier spending are decided inside the company and nowhere else, which is why a company's owners can direct this outcome on their own and why it sits at the top of the scale.

How this was scoredPivotal

Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.

We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.

Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.

Sources

3 campaigns on record

As You Sow (on behalf of the AJL Foundation-led Colorado coalition) at Arrow Electronics☆ Follow2024 · shareholder resolution

Requested disclosure of the company's diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs, as part of the same Colorado place-based shareholder effort described above.

Result: Resolution withdrawn after the company agreed to take action, according to the filer's own case study; exact vote percentage (if any vote occurred) not confirmed in the sources retrieved. Filed under SEC Rule 14a-8.

According to the filer's own account, the company committed to steps addressing the resolution's demands; the specific commitments made were not detailed in the source retrieved.

Harnessing Shareholder Power in Colorado: A Place-Based Model for Philanthropic, Investor and Corporate Accountability, AJL Foundation

As You Sow (on behalf of the AJL Foundation-led Colorado coalition) at Pilgrim's Pride☆ Follow2024 · shareholder resolution

Requested disclosure of the company's diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs, as part of a broader place-based effort by Colorado funders to hold Colorado-headquartered companies accountable to local community standards.

According to the filer's own account, the company committed to steps addressing the resolution's demands; the specific commitments made were not detailed in the source retrieved.

Harnessing Shareholder Power in Colorado: A Place-Based Model for Philanthropic, Investor and Corporate Accountability, AJL Foundation

United for Respect Education Fund at Walmart☆ Follow2023 · shareholder resolution

Asked Walmart's board to commission an independent, third-party racial equity audit analyzing the company's impact on Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities and employees, with the results made public and improvements recommended. Related investor materials tied this to workers' difficulty advancing into management.

Result: Sources give slightly different figures for the same vote. Sourcing Journal, via Yahoo Finance, reports 18.1% of votes cast in favor. Majority Action reports 18.2% of all shares voted, and 42% of shares voted by shareholders independent of the Walton family. The 0.1 percentage point difference may reflect rounding or a different vote-count base. The proposal did not pass. Filed under SEC Rule 14a-8.

We found no documented racial equity audit completed by Walmart in response to this vote. Refiled versions of the same ask failed in 2024 and 2025, drawing 15.4% and 6.9% support respectively per the Sourcing Journal account, which indicates the audit had not been carried out.

Walmart faces racial equity audit shareholder proposal, Governance Intelligence

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JUST Capital, every item scored for how far it depends on owners voting their values, with the reasoning and the sources behind each rating.

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How this rating was made

Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.

Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.

The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is JUST Capital's, and we link to their original.

How we score dependency, in full.